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Electoral prospects looking grim for Thomas Mulcair’s NDP: Hébert

Thomas Mulcair will need all the assistance he can get to hang on to existing NDP territory next fall, let alone gain enough ground to win the election.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, pictured in his office on Parliament Hill on Friday, has invited back onto his team some of the main architects of former leader Jack Layton’s last campaign. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

MONTREAL — Under the guise of calling all hands on deck for an upcoming election NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair issued a cry for help this week.

His decision to invite back some of the main architects of Jack Layton’s last campaign comes at a time when every poll suggests he will need all the assistance he can get to hang on to existing NDP territory next fall, let alone gain enough ground to win the election. To achieve the latter Mulcair would require a shift in the tectonic plates of Ontario second only to that which took place in Quebec in 2011.

Based on his party’s distant third-place standing in Canada’s largest province, an electoral miracle of Laytonesque proportion is called for.

If it is going to be a contender for federal power next fall, the NDP needs to more than double its Ontario support.

For that to happen, Justin Trudeau would presumably have to campaign even more poorly than Michael Ignatieff did in 2011. That part of the equation is largely out of Mulcair’s control.

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But to benefit from a poor Liberal campaign, the NDP leader would also need to convince disaffected Trudeau supporters to move over to his party rather than stay home or support the Conservatives.

In the face of such long odds, it is a credit to Mulcair’s talent and to the NDP’s recent history in Quebec that no one is completely dismissing the party’s chances to stage a second consecutive spectacular surge in as many elections.

But lightning — even of the political kind — rarely strikes twice and based on the party’s polling numbers there are worse scenarios for the NDP next fall than failing to make it to government.

It took the federal New Democrats half a century to become a national party in more than name. But next fall Mulcair could have to fight hard to hang on to the ground gained under Alexa McDonough and Layton. And in that battle the real threat is not Stephen Harper but Trudeau.

In Atlantic Canada, the Liberals outperform the NDP three or four votes to one. Support for Trudeau’s party has hovered around the 50 per cent mark across the region for more than a year.

The strength of the NDP incumbents could be all that makes the difference between an Atlantic Canada rout and a holding pattern. For the NDP the new year began with the loss of one such incumbent.

Veteran New Brunswick MP Yvon Godin is hanging up his skates after seven campaigns and his retirement means that the sole remaining NDP seat in New Brunswick will be at play next fall, with the Liberals well placed to make a gain.

More importantly perhaps, with the Acadie-Bathurst MP gone, the NDP has lost a rare non-Quebec MP who actually enjoyed a real connection to Quebec.

Even before Layton became leader and brought Mulcair on board, Godin’s battle on behalf of the unemployed had gone a long way to put the NDP on the map of the Quebec regions — a territory where the party had no presence until then.

Quebecers also took notice of his bid to ensure that Supreme Court justices be able to hear arguments in either official language without the help of an interpreter.

For many francophone Quebec voters, the place of their language in federal institutions matters more than the conditions under which the NDP would be willing to negotiate their province’s departure from the federation

The party’s enduring competitive position in francophone Quebec is a fragile one — at the mercy of erosion to the Bloc Québécois. Nowhere are NDP roots more shallow than in Mulcair’s home province.

These are ridings where the Trudeau era is not always remembered fondly. But if Mulcair were to try to fend off a Liberal revival in Quebec by trashing the Trudeau legacy, he would pay a price for it in Ontario.

On the morning after the last election few would have predicted, that almost four years later, Quebec would be the province most steadfast in its pre-election support for the NDP and fewer still would have predicted that such a development would be cause for little more than cold comfort for the stalled New Democrats.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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